Thursday, February 07, 2013

Philosophy?

A week after rolling out a sweeping revamp of how Ohio funds schools, Gov. John Kasich
said he still has not seen any material detailing how much state money each of Ohio’s 612 school
districts would receive under his plan.
He hasn’t seen the numbers –which show that 368 school districts would get no additional
money over two years – but defended a comment he made last week pertaining to the amounts of state
dollars allocated to rich and poor districts.
“No I don’t look at those because it’s the philosophy that matters,” Kasich said following a
town-hall meeting with business professionals in Dayton to promote his tax proposals. “And to look
at a run and yank out one part of it distorts the whole purpose of it. … We said we were going to
fund the school system on the basis of dollars following pupils.”

Isn't that special? John Kasich doesn't care how much your particular school district loses in his budget "...because it's the philosophy that matters..." It doesn't matter that the schools in your neighborhood have to lay off teachers, because John Kasich is more interested in promoting his far right, anti-public school "philosophy" which aims to hand the education of our young people to greedy, corporate, charter school owners.

What Kasich fails to realize is that we care more about our children's education than his misguided "philosophy" that he is pushing. Gov. Kasich should take a look at how his "philosophy" is going to hurt our public schools, but it appears that he just doesn't care.

You can see the budget and the money that the state will give to each district here. More than half of the school districts in Ohio are getting an zero increase in state funding.